Maurya and Shunga Art c4.4

c4.4

That this was indeed the case is fully borne out by early Buddhist and Jaina texts and supported by early Buddhist sculptural reliefs that reveal the flourishing existence, particularly in Middle and Eastern India, of a primitive religion that indulged in the worship of such symbols as the ‘chaitya’ which was either a holy tree or groves of trees ( rukkhachetiya, vanachetiya, ārāma-chetiya etc. ), and not unfrequently these trees were the abode of gods or spirits known as vṛikshadevatās, yakshas, etc. Another important symbol that received worship was the ‘stūpa’, a hemispherical tumulus, either votive or commemorative. All such objects and places of primitive worship were enclosed for protection with a railing which must have given the people some scope for the play of their artistic and decorative instincts.⁵ A third object that also seems to have been an important element in the primitive religion of Middle and Eastern India was the animal standard, the ‘dhvaja-stambha’ of later Indian literature, i.e. posts or pillars crowned by animals considered sacred and therefore worshipped by primitive peoples. This trait of primitive religion was not particularly characteristic of India alone, but was equally potent in Babylonia and Assyria as well as in ancient Greece. Later Brahmanical mythology knows of such standards or ‘stambhas’ of at least three different animal-gods, namely the Garuḍa, the Vṛisha and the Makara, the ‘vāhanas’ of Viṣṇu, Śiva, Gaṅgā and Kandarpa respectively. Sometimes the animal was substituted by certain trees considered sacred, the Kalpadruma or the ‘wishing tree’, for example, and the palm tree represented by its crowning cluster of leaves.⁶ It was evidently from such early specimens of primitive animal standards made of impermanent materials like wood and bamboo etc. that Aśoka seems to have derived the inspiration of erecting monumental pillars crowned by sacred animals.